a worthless existence

3.


The Coach and Horses has always been there, and the people who frequent it always seemed to have been there too. It is an old-fashioned, large, red brick building with small leaded windows and a familiar, strangely heart-warming smell of stale ale and cigarettes. The dusty sign on the wall read ‘smart dress essential’ the one below it advertised live sky sports and below that ‘smoking permitted throughout’. Despite the smoking ban the back door was rarely closed with the succession of smokers forming some kind of endless Olympic relay team back and to. As a result there was as much smoke in the pub as being blown out. Upon entering the bar it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. Jez was at the bar. The landlord: John: a grumpy sort, gave me an inquisitive, disinterested and vaguely disappointed look. Jez had taken the liberty of ordering me a lager, £1.50, it was happy hour!
John had been the landlord for as long as I could remember and was a unique character. He was the only landlord I knew who actually resented his customers. He resented the money they earned, he resented the cars they owned, he resented them coming into his pub. John was a huge, balding man in his fifties. He had hands like shovels and preferred to do as little as possible. In his prime he had been a professional Rugby League player for a top club. He had even been to Wembley, but had earned little from it except a reputation and a twisted nose. He was an insufferable gambler and not a good one. To win on the fruit machine after John had spent the day filling it out of his own pocket was playing with fire; it would be safer to have been caught in bed with his wife reading his racing post. Some of the regulars at the bar, each day, were younger than John and retired, John feigned friendship with them and they with him but when backs were turned there was a mutual loathing. He put up with them for the money they brought in and they put up with John, well, because they had to. John’s wife was Jean, she was often in the background and they seemingly made a good couple, on the surface. But deep down everyone knew that this was a show they put on for the customers to disguise a marriage that had been dead for years. Johns gambling, drinking, infidelity and violent temper had taken its toll on their relationship and it was only that fact that they were too old, too ugly and too scared to go their separate ways that had held them together. Rumour had it that she had caught him in a compromising position with a bar maid on the pool table one night, after hours, and had broken a porcelain ashtray over his head. No one knows for sure. The only thing I know is that I never dared ask him. John was renowned through out the town as a man not to tangle with.
I ordered two more pints and decided to hunt for a seat. I sensed from the swarms of Liverpool shirt wearing drinkers pouring through the doors glaring expectantly at the big screen that the quiz was off.
Half pissed thirsty drinkers were loading their rickety tables to near breaking point, table legs buckling under a sea of pints. The bar was three deep and the whole place a deafening clamour of drunken conversations battling like hungry seagulls to be the loudest.Jez found a seat in an enviable position. A spacious table 'benefiting from front and rear seating located in close proximity, and with easy access, to both the TV and the bar. A desirable and much sought after location ideal for the first time drinker.'Skin heads, Polo shirts, classic trainers and jeans jostled all around us. Everyone in there could have been brothers. Their conversation was typically loud and crude. A good early start on the beers had ensured that the language would be as course and raw as anywhere in the town. An hour to kick off and there was a salient air of both anxiety and anticipation mixing with the already beer fuelled mercurial atmosphere.
I was arguing with Jez over who’s round it was with the fags when a voice boomed in our direction;“Oi! You used to pick on me at school didn’t you?”Jez always cocksure, span round grinning with an unlit fag pursed between his lips to discover the question had been aimed his way. Stood before him there loomed a colossus of a man. Shaven headed leaving only the very merest suggestion as to his hairs natural blonde colour. Arms like concrete battering rams welded together across a barrel sized chest. Jez’s grin drained agonisingly from his face and the fag drooped and lolled flaccidly against his now sagging chin. Trying to regain his composure Jez weighed up his options. Being of a light build he had only one discernable advantage over this Goliath; speed. But penned into a crowded boozer he mentally concluded he was buggered.“Fuck off” He spat, removing the fag from his face “ as if id pick on you, look at the size of you”“Yeah, you did, you picked on me at school, I remember” Goliath came back. A sly smirk swept slowly across his moon like face, eyes narrowed menacingly indicating the impending danger. Goliath took a step nearer to our table willing him to squirm. An apology or an offer of the beverage of Goliaths preference might go some way to mending the old wounds I thought but Jez, not always one for logical thought patterns, broke with usual protocol and rather gamely offered“Fuck off, if anyone’s the bully round here its you. Look at you stood there flexing your steroid pumped arms thinking your it, do us a favour and piss off!” Goliaths teeth clenched in morbid rage.I’m not sure whether Jez saw or felt the blow that swept so briskly across his face. His bottom jaw seemed to spring across the lounge bar like a till drawer opening and then savagely snapping shut. With a customary rolling of the eye balls into the back of his head Jez’s seat suddenly became temporarily available and Goliath melted back into the throng of delighted on lookers. The perfect aperitif to the big match, and the end of our night. The landlord, apparently a friend of Goliath, deemed the affray to be our fault and barred us both.